The Once, Possibly, Almost Corey Jenna Hammond

this week i had to try and move through time. eaiser said than done buddy! i tried to explain something important to my identity by using a scene in the past embedded in a scene from the present. my head hurts. anyways, here is the lil bit that i've got. in the future i'll explain more about the name and expand on the memory more probably. anyways, here it is...


The brilliant diamond refused to be unseen on my left hand and I couldn’t stop looking at it. This Christmas would top them all for the rest of my life. It’s like Santa himself came down and said, “Oh hey Corey, you know that ‘happily ever after’ thing Cinderella was in on, how about some of that?” Uhm, let me think, sure. Matt and I hadn’t been engaged for twenty four hours, and already it seemed like the whole world knew.  His mom had been at our house gushing over us for all of five seconds before the serious discussion began.

            “So, Corey, do you think you’ll take Morrow as your last name? Corey Morrow?”

            “Uhm, I guess I hadn’t really thought about it yet, but probably”, I was lying. I had thought about it. I thought about the future of my last name often actually. My last name had always been a sensitive subject in my life and my feelings about it had been different for almost two years now. The contents of an old cardboard box had changed everything, and there in the room my grandparents once shared, my life shifted.

In that room, I sat on the floor, cheeks damp from slow rolling tears. The room was bright and empty. Millions of tiny dust pieces swirled in the sunlight that poured through the sliding glass door. It was silent, save for the distant ruffle of my mom and grandma in the spare room at the other end of the house. I sat amongst old boxes, their contents pilled in mountains of memory around me. I was looking without knowing what I sought. Now that he was gone, I could think of a hundred questions I wanted to ask him. What was Vietnam like? What was his favorite book? This was both vastly important and irrelevant all at the same time.

            I was digging through boxes that my mom didn’t want to. I wanted to see what was hiding in them for all these years before our heritage was shoved in the back of a closet again. She said it was just old junk, but in my own experience, the good stuff always hides with the junk. I searched slowly, content with the time passing as I had nothing else to do that bright afternoon.

            I swished my hand through a box full of loose papers, swirling through them with ease. A hard cover found my fingertip and I plunged deeper, my elbow disappearing in the sea of paper. I pulled the book from the bottom of the box and sent papers pouring over the edge. “Cooley High, 1940”. I knew that name. I always loved hearing about Poppy’s time at Cooley, because the name sounded like something out of Grease or West Side Story; it was so authentic. I would wait patiently for Poppy to tell me that he sang and dance his way between classes, but it never happened. I cracked the book open and it smelled like the library.

            Old books are always enchanting. I flipped through the pages, looking for Poppy’s dark hair and big eyes.

“Allen…Allen… where is he?” I wondered.

I scanned the first few pages of every class, searching for his last name, my last name. He wasn’t there. Why would Poppy have a yearbook for a year he wasn’t in school? It didn’t make sense.

I stood up and brushed years of dust off my sweatpants.

“Mom?” I yelled, stopping in the living room. I was too perplexed to walk all the way to her.

“What?” she walked in, trailed by Gramma.

“Why do we have this yearbook? Look, Poppy isn’t in here anywhere” I flipped pages to prove my point.

“That’s his, he graduated in 1940” she assured me.

“Uhh then where is he?” I was out of patience and I wasn’t blind, he wasn’t in there.

She took the yearbook from me and turned the yellowing pages, “Here.” She pointed to a picture I knew well.

“Carter Hammond? What’s that about?” I was so confused now. Why would Poppy change his name? Allen wasn’t Gramma’s last name either, she was a Renner.

“Allen was Poppy’s step-dad’s last name. He took it after his mom got remarried, but that was after he graduated high-school.”

“How come you never told me?” I was in disbelief. This was the closest thing we had to a family secret and I had to hear it before realizing I’d waited twenty two years for its reveal. All those times I had to trace our lineage back for some lame school project, she never thought to tell me my bloodline name was Hammond?

“I didn’t know it was important”, she said as her and Gramma were drifting back towards their project in the spare room.

Not important. Was it important? I marinated. It felt important. My head swirled like the sheets of paper the yearbook was buried in. I could have been Corey Hammond. That sounded weird in my head and I didn’t like it.

Until now I was so attached to Allen. It was my mom’s last name and I had been proud of it, no matter how many fights it caused. I had planned on keeping it even when I got married because of the massacres we had been through because of it. Dad wanted me to have his last name, Ritenour. And after twenty two years of fighting over it, whether to hyphenate it or not, I felt weird holding onto Allen so tightly when it wasn’t really ours.

Gramma and Poppy’s house dissolved; the yearbook evaporated from my hands as the memory faded back to the depths. The smells of Christmas morning breakfast pulled me back and I smiled at the tiny sun on my finger. When Matt asked me to marry him, the answer was obvious, and the choice to change my last name would follow. I would become a Morrow on our wedding day and put the controversy to rest once and for all. After being in a family full of last name drama, I was looking forward to the peace and quiet a new last name would bring.